This paper confronts the wide political support for the 2C objective of global increase in temperature, reaffirmed in Copenhagen, with the consistent set of hypotheses on which it relies. It explains why neither an almost zero pure time preference nor concerns about catastrophic damages in case...

Interactions between food demand, biomass energy and forest preservation are driving both food prices and land-use changes, regionally and globally. This study presents a new model called Nexus Land-Use which describes these interactions through a generic representation of agricultural...

In a context of rapid urbanization and energy transition, massive investments will be required to develop efficient public transport networks. Capturing the increase in land value caused by transport infrastructure (for example, through a betterment tax) appears a promising way to finance public...

This paper presents a first estimate of the exposure of the world’s large port cities (population exceeding one million inhabitants in 2005) to coastal flooding due to sea-level rise and storm surge now and in the 2070s, taking into account scenarios of socio-economic and climate changes. The...

Cost-benefit analyses require comparing costs and benefits that occur at different points in time. Doing so, however, creates conflicts between short-term considerations - a discounting scheme has to be consistent with observed behaviours - and long-term ethical issues - a discounting scheme...

Many economic sectors, like housing or transportation, are exposed to climate and likely to suffer efficiency losses when climate changes. The global economy is far from dematerialized yet, these sectors represent a significant fraction of the existing capital stock. Using an optimal growth...

This paper offers a comprehensive description of the integrated assessment model (IAM) RESPONSE developed at CIRED. RESPONSE aims at providing a consistent framework to appraise alternative modelling choices made by the main existing IAMs. It is designed as a flexible tool able to take different...

Climate models project large changes in rainfall, but disagree on their magnitude and sign. The consequences of this uncertainty on optimal dam dimensioning is assessed for a small mountainous catchment in Greece. Optimal dam design is estimated using a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) based on...

Given disparate beliefs about economic growth, technical change and damage caused by climate change, this paper starts with the seeming impossibility of determining a unique time profile of the social costs of carbon as a benchmark for climate negotiations and for infrastructure decisions that...

Motivated by the conclusions from various modelling studies, modifications to the bioenergy sector regulations are under way in Europe and in the USA to account for emissions from indirect land-use change (ILUC). Despite their influence on the policy-making, evaluations of the capacity of...